We're Painted Red to Fit Right In
by Carbon65
Summary: He can't breathe. His hands are shaking. His chest is tightening. He can't do this. The boy reminds him of Nick and he is all alone. AU: Post apocalyptic.


**WE'RE PAINTED RED TO FIT RIGHT IN**

_Listening suggestion: "This is War" by Thirty seconds to Mars (watch?v=Zcps2fJKuAI) and "Radioactive" covered by Pentatonix and Lindsey Sterling (watch?v=aE2GCa-_nyU)_

_For NiffisForever._

* * *

He can't do this. Not now, maybe not ever. It's too hot. He can't catch his breath. The little room is stifling. He's choking.

With practiced care, he removes his long leather duster from the hook by the door and pulls his hat low over his head.

The night is dark and blessedly silent. The rumble of engines and tanks has died away with the fading sun. The chatter of men in the barracks is too distant; the centuries are silent and deadly as the night itself. Someone has gagged the child behind him, so the screaming is gone as well. Not even the insects hum anymore. They've adapted to this new world.

The sky is a blue so deep that you can't see the bottom, with the gray of distant clouds on the horizon. It's the same sky he remembers from his childhood, although the stars are dark now. His eyes are not what they once were. He looks up, thankful for the balm after the glare of the fluorescent lights. That's all they can get now: fluorescents. And, they're damn lucky to have them.

The air is cool against his burning cheeks, with the gentle kiss of raindrops. He hardly smells the stink anymore; it's been years since he's smelled anything else. The place smells of diesel and unwashed bodies and rotten meat, but it's a change from the metallic tang of fresh blood in his nose.

The boy in the room back there, he's going to die. And there's nothing he can do. Not one damned thing.

It's Nick, all over again.

The name brings back a flood of memories. It's a flood he's kept behind a dam, built up by years of hardening his heart against everyone and everything, of promising himself that he would survive because he'd been given a second chance, and of pushing himself to the brink of mental and physical collapse.

_They're in the basement under the place that was once a school called Dalton Academy. It's so cold: even though they're inside they've put on coats and scarves and hats. _

_Everyone is cold to the bone, except for him. A fire burns in his bones, trying to scorch him from the inside out. Everything hurts. Everything is a half remembered mirage of too bright colors and too loud sounds._

_"Please, babe, it's so hot. Let me take it off!" He begs the brunette._

_Nick, sweet gentle Nick, just shakes his head. "You'll be cold in a minute." His words are like magic, because the fire turns to burning ice._

He fumbles in his pocket for a tin of tobacco and rolling papers. He has a few real cigarettes, the kind that come pre-rolled and nice, but he's saving them for a social occasion. Like bribing the Peacekeepers.

He picked up smoking after drinking swill alcohol almost killed him. Sebastian and Trent saved him. They pulled him away from the last bottle. They poured clean ethanol down his throat when he was so desperate that he drank ethylene glycol to end things. And they kept it away from him when he dipped to far. They sat with him every year on the anniversary.

Every year except this one. The year he is alone.

He lights a match, and takes a long draw. The acrid smoke fills his lungs, and burns. He coughs, but he no longer wretches the way he once did. Instead, he takes a deep breath of smoke and lets himself relax.

His heartbeat recedes from his ears. His breath slows. His hands stop shaking. He can do this. He returns to the treatment room.

_"He's burning up Wes. We have to do something."_

_He can barely hear the voices over the roaring. It is dark and so cold. _

_"We can't go out there. No with what's come down." The boy sounds resigned by firm. "We can't risk it."_

_"But he'll die!" There's a note of desperation._

_A sigh. "Then he'll be safe and warm with David and Thad and Beatz and Andrew. We have to stay together. We can't go out there. It isn't safe."_

_"You're a bloody bastard." The words are flung like missiles from a broken boy with a broken heart. "You don't fucking care. I hate you!"_

_"Nick…" The words are feeble._

_Feet pound, and a door slams. Then, there is silent sobbing._

He does a messy transfusion, but it works. It's a procedure that was perfected years ago, and then handed down. He's good at it, almost perfect but not quite. He mixes the boy's blood and his mother's on a mirror, and when they don't ball up together, he transfers between them.

He sews. His stitches aren't good. His hands aren't as steady as they used to be. His eyes aren't as good and the fifteen-hour shift he's been working doesn't help. But, he's the only one here who can do it. He's the only one here who was ever trained in this. He will need to train someone new soon, but the younger generation has no appreciation for sterility or clean work. Its just slap-dash and a scar too boot.

They manage to save the boy, at least for now. The mine has blown his leg to shreds, but it's clean and free of the contained soil they are still finding. The Geiger counter doesn't click any more furiously over the boy than it does over anyone else's in the room. The pieces of bone they can find are pushed back into place and the wounds are sewn up. They wrap it and splint it.

The boy might even keep the leg and be able to walk on it, if he's truly lucky. Although perhaps this is luck. A man with a limp or one leg cannot be a soldier. And a solider does not live to be an old man, now.

He leaves the clinic in the gray pre-dawn light. He wraps himself in his long coat. In the darkness, it looked black, but now it is clearly the red of a medic. He wraps the white band around his arm that marks him as on errand. Once upon a time, doctors wore all white because they were clean and pure. Now, their hands are as bloody as soldiers.

He tests the half-filled bottle of ethanol in his bag. In the gray of early morning, his nails and eyes are as jaundiced as the stubs of dry grass on the parade ground.

He walks by the Peacekeeper, slipping them all but one of his good cigarettes. He's not going to need them where he's going.

A hot, dry wind stirs the coat around his boots and he trudges the three miles to the old burned out shell that was once a boy's school. He walks past the fine main building, now derelict and foreboding with its windows half boarded up like missing teeth. He walks past the barn. The chalk circle is still on the floor from when they used to play at war. He walks past the chicken coops which have been empty for birds for so many years not even the stink of ammonia lingers. He can't remember the last time he saw a chicken or tasted an egg.

He walks up to the little hill overlooking the creek and the path through the forest where he and Wes used to run. There is a tree at the top, old and perhaps half alive, but still clinging to life. Its leaves, dusty the with summer heat, stir overhead in the half forgotten whisper of a lover.

_"I've never felt this way about anyone, Jeff. I don't care about my family. I don't care about Amy. I don't care about Simon. I don't care about anyone. I want you."_

Above his head, he can see the crudely carved JS+ND in a heart. When he is gone, it will be the only reminder that two boys called Jeff Sterling and Nick Duvall ever lived, ever loved each other.

Kurt and Blaine died together in the first plague.  
Hunter left to play soldier, and came back in a box.  
Wes was murdered one night for his pair of worn-out Nikes with holes in the sole. It was back in the old days when things were wild.  
Sebastian was blown to bits by a suicide bomber during the winter.  
Trent finally gave into the leukemia from the radiation as the snow finally melted.  
And Nick. Nick died of an infection from a bullet wound he'd sustained getting penicillin for him.

He lights a cigarette and sits back against the tree. He's so damn tired. It's been so damn long. He doesn't want to be alone any more. He wants to go home.

He curls up against the tree and rescues his precious bottle of alcohol. He uncorks it, and raises it in the air. The smell of pure, distilled grain liquor hits his nose but he does not flinch.

He drinks deeply of the liquid fire, letting it course down his esophagus and into his stomach.

He's so damn tired. He curls against the tree. His tree. Nick's tree, and lets himself drift.

He whispers the words, letting them break on his paper dry lips. _"I don't care about anyone else. I love you, too, Nicky."_

* * *

_A/N: I'm no sure this satisfied the prompt, but it's what I needed to write? And you did say anything I wanted so long as it was Niff or Huntbastian AU. I wanted a desolate, dystopian, post-apocalyptic feel and the idea of a doctor in red wouldn't get out of my head. _

_Title is a lyric from the _Radioactive_ by Imagine Dragons._

_More of other good things later. Comments, critiques, questions, suggestions, etc. all welcome. – C65_


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